Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) rally at Sproul Plaza, 1969, Third World Strike at University of California, Berkeley collection, 1968-1972, UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library.
Since 1969, the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley has relied on grassroots efforts to collect, preserve, and amplify research and literature of studies on “race, ethnicity, indigeneity, with a focus on the experiences and perspectives of people of color within and beyond the United States.” The Ethnic Studies Department offers four different areas of study: Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Chicanx Latinx Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies. This department also oversees the Ethnic Studies Library, which was established in 1997. All the resources offered by the department today come from years of student activism to broaden academic perspectives offered in higher education.
The core of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley draws from the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF). This movement emerged in the late 60s as a response to glaring disparities in representation of ethnicities in humanities and social sciences courses offered by higher education. Conversations involving cultural diversity in higher education were catalyzed by the Higher Education Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965. The Higher Education Act of 1965 provided financial support for educational programs in universities throughout the country and for students wishing to study. Simultaneously, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 increased cultural diversity in the United States by ending the quota system of immigration that prioritized immigrants from European countries. Thus, the demographics of students in higher education changed dramatically, and the need for adequate representation in academia became more clear.
The TWLF movement began at San Francisco State University (SFSU) with protests by the Black Student Union and other student groups. After connecting with the movement at SFSU, student organizations at UC Berkeley formed their own coalition. The Third World Liberation Front at Berkeley included the Afro-American Studies Union (AASU), the Mexican-American Student Confederation (MASC), the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), and the Native American Student Alliance (NASA).
Troy Duster, an emeritus professor of sociology at UC Berkeley witnessed the beginnings of the TWLF. During his time as a professor, he grappled with tensions between faculty of the Berkeley Department of Sociology and its students. In his oral history, Duster reflects on the reservations of faculty at Berkeley:
Troy Duster. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.
The faculty view was, these insurgent militant students wanted to insert politics into the curriculum while the faculty were simply the neutral purveyors of the established wisdom. So the faculty could typically take the quote, “high moral ground,” that there are these books, there are these articles, “We teach, we teach the canon.” And so they were not just insulted by the students saying that, “We know more than you, you should be giving us a different kind of education.” They went further in terms of putting down the students, that “this was mere politics.” So the ingredients for a titanic clash were there. The faculty had it this way, life as usual, “You should come into the classroom, you should be happy to be here, we let you in, sit down. Shut up. Enjoy the show.” And the militant students saying, “No,” categorically in the other direction, “we want a revisitation of the whole idea of what constitutes a legitimate curriculum.”
Duster also noticed new political divides among Berkeley faculty during the TWLF. Some faculty who supported the Free Speech Movement were less receptive to the movement for Ethnic Studies at Berkeley. One major difference, he notes, was closer proximity to conflict than before:
Well, in the middle sixties, most of the faculty was quite liberal. They were saying, “Of course one should be in favor of civil rights in the South.” What happened in the late sixties is therefore important to sociology and to the local scene, both local sociology and national issues. Because suddenly the issue is no longer liberal about the South, liberal about what is happening way over there. One had to be responding to students on campus who wanted transformation locally. And faculty who had been progressives and liberals in the national scene often found themselves becoming quite conservative, and often portrayed as reactionary when it came to the local scene. So I would say sociology—and indeed, it was true I think for a good part of Berkeley and I think all over the country, but you saw it here sharply and dramatically—you saw people who had been pro-FSM and very much in favor of the students shifting their political position when it came to local scenes about protest on campus, when it came to the Vietnam War, and then later on, most especially the transformation of academic life on campus, namely the insurgency with Black studies and women’s studies.
Students organized a democratic system linking various campus groups to guide decision-making for the TWLF. In his oral history, Harvey Dong, one of many organizers and members of AAPA involved in the TWLF, reflects on his perspective of initial member organization. Harvey Dong recalls the internal politics of the TWLF:
Harvey Dong in 1972. Courtesy of Harvey Dong.
Even though there were only six Native Americans on campus, they would still have that equal voting power to decide on strike related politics. So you had African Americans, Asians, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. They all had equally divided 25 percent power on the votes.
The organization used this democratic process to create a list of demands of the University. It sought to establish a “Third World College,” “Third World People in Positions of Power,” and adequate funding to uphold the integrity of the programs. Due to the inadequacy of existing plans by the University to establish a Black Studies Department, the TWLF began the TWLS (Third World Liberation Strike) on January 21, 1969. Dong shares his memory of the strike and witnessing police violence:
The strike was informational in the beginning. So there’d be picketing, chanting in front of Dwinelle Plaza. And then an announcement would be made that the informational part was ending and then there would be a sealing off of the Sather Gate area, which did lead to some tension in terms of people not crossing. Although if you wanted to cross you could just kind of go on the other gates or the other bridges nearby. And then the stationary picket line at Sather Gate would be attacked by plainclothes police. The police would be followed by uniformed police. Okay. The plainclothes would be followed by uniform and then the strike would escalate. The escalation would reach the point where there’d be thousands of students. The police would call for mutual assistance, which would include highway patrol officers. There would be tear gassing.
“Strike 1969” TWLF pamphlet, Third World Strike at University of California, Berkeley collection, 1968-1972, UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library.
Protesters used a variety of tactics to advocate for ethnic studies: hunger strikes, rallies, class boycotts, and sit-ins. These approaches effectively agitated the university and the state government, ultimately motivating a police crackdown. Cristina Kim, Harvey Dong’s interviewer, remarks:
The TWLS at UC Berkeley was one of the most violently repressed student protests in the history of the United States. Governor Ronald Reagan—who had already forged his political career in opposition to “Berkeley Radicalism”—deployed the California Highway Patrol, the Alameda Police, [the Berkeley Police Department] and the National Guard to quell the uprisings with tear gas and batons.
In contrast to the Free Speech Movement, Winthrop D. Jordan, a professor emeritus of slavery and race relations in the United States, also describes the TWLS as more violent in his oral history. He emphasizes the university’s employment of troops, civic, and military forces to suppress the strike. Jordan was a professor of history at Berkeley from 1963 to 1982, and modified his course schedule to accommodate students participating in the TWLS. During his preparations to teach the antebellum period of US history (generally considered 1812 to 1861), he recalls his discussion with students before the strike began:
[My preparations] began at the same time that the Third World Strike began, so I was confronted with what was I going to do? Start this course, and being in some ways a conservative, what I ended up doing was I taught it on campus and also off campus. I taught it in two sessions. I told the group when I met them, I said, “The Third World Strike is coming next week and we’ve got a decision, and some of you aren’t going to be able to come on campus and I recognize that. I feel that I have to teach the course. If it’s scheduled it’s my university obligation, I have to teach it on campus. But does anybody have a large living room where we can do it off campus?” I said, “I’m going to teach it back-to-back, two sections, and people can come to whichever they like, they get equal chance of getting an A or an F in the course.”
As a workaround, one student offered a large living room in a fraternity house on Piedmont Avenue for the course. Jordan recalls the reaction of students to the unlikely off-campus location:
Winthrop D. Jordan. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library
I was a little surprised when I got there. There was one great big, perfect room to meet in, their room on the first floor near the front door. I gave lectures there. When students came to the first one, I remember they’d look at the number, at their notepad, on the number on it, and then look at the house. They’d come in with very surprised looks on their faces, mostly Black undergraduates. That’s where I held it all semester, and then I held it on campus as scheduled, so I taught it back to back.
After months of negotiations between student activists, the ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California), and Chancellor Roger Heyns, the chancellor announced the establishment of an Ethnic Studies Department at Berkeley on March 4th, 1969. This announcement came on the same day the ASUC voted 550 to 4 in support of an Ethnic Studies Department at Berkeley with adequate funding for its longevity. The demand for a Third World College did not see administrative support from the university, but the chancellor stated the department would “immediately offer four year programs leading to a B.A. degree in history, culture, and contemporary experience of ethnic minority groups, especially Black Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans.” The strike officially came to an end.
After the establishment of the Ethnic Studies Department, Deena González accepted her offer to UC Berkeley for the history graduate program in 1974. Her lived experience as a Chicana and previous involvement in student activism during her undergraduate career at New Mexico State University informed her research focus on Chicana studies. During her studies as a PhD student, González recalls seeing farmworkers speak at Sproul Plaza about racial justice. She draws comparison between Dolores Huerta’s speech at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in the late sixties and the speeches of the farmworkers:
Deena González. Courtesy of Deena González.
I remember going to Sproul Plaza one day feeling a little bit lonely, feeling tired. The farmworkers were speaking. I [remembered I had heard] Dolores Huerta speak at UNM maybe in ’69, ’70 and so I went to hear her, and I thought, this sounds really familiar. And what she did was she began talking about the work of people who labor in the fields and whose lives are marked by insensitivity of others and so on. I think she had said this in Albuquerque, too, about what is wrong about standing up for people who bring food to the table, so you can eat, and that kind of thing; powerful, powerful messages. I remember thinking to myself, wow—growing up in New Mexico as I did and even in the movement of the sixties and understanding the power differentials and class and racial privilege, I’ve never thought about it in the context of a kind of academic field of study. And who had spoken before her and who spoke after her were people who were talking about Chicano studies, and they were saying as a requirement of the university, Ethnic studies as a requirement began even then, and of course didn’t come to fruition till I think, what, the late eighties that finally something got put on the books. It made an impression, it made a really deep impression, and again it was one of these I needed to know more [of], I don’t know enough, and how am I going to get there.
The recurring message of racial justice between Dolores Huerta at University of New Mexico and the farmworkers at Sproul Plaza inspired González to look further into ethnic studies. Later in her academic career, González witnessed changing attitudes in the Department of History. In her view, respect for Ethnic Studies improved notably from 1974 to 1983:
I think there was more of a [reconciliation] these were legitimate fields of study. You couldn’t do US history if you didn’t know African American studies–that’s just impossible and not good. And, I think people are coming around to thinking that if you don’t know Latino and Latina history in the US or Chicano and Chicana studies in the Southwest, you’re certainly not going to be able to do a very credible job of being a faculty member who is conveying to students the freshest, most cutting-edge scholarship.
Outside of SFSU and UC Berkeley, the Bay Area felt the repercussions of the TWLF. On November 20th, 1969, Native American activists, including Dr. LaNada War Jack (a student activist in the TWLF with NASA), occupied Alcatraz to protest in support of indigenous land sovereignty and rights. Occupiers sought to reclaim land for indigenous peoples after centuries of dispossession due to colonialism. Activists who participated in the TWLS at Berkeley also played a significant role in the International Hotel Strike in 1977, namely Emil de Guzman and Harvey Dong. This strike intended to prevent eviction of Filipino and Chinese people living in the residential hotel as part of an ongoing gentrification process in old Manilatown of San Francisco.
Today, the legacy of student activists lives on in the university through the Ethnic Studies Department, the Ethnic Studies Library, the Multicultural Community Center, the Center for Race and Gender, and many other organizations. Ethnic studies at Berkeley directly stems from the tireless efforts of student activists advocating for equality and representation.
TWLF, UC Berkeley (131_24). Courtesy of Stephen Shames
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Sophia Faaland is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley studying history. They work at the Oral History Center in the Bancroft Library as a Student Editor and contribute to research for the Istanpolis project within the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program. Previously, they worked as a research apprentice and field student at the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
The Oral History Center (OHC) is hosting a two-week Summer Institute in Art History program from June 8 – 21, 2026. The program is for scholars and professionals studying art history and visual culture to foster an in-depth understanding of oral history. This program will be held on UC Berkeley’s campus and participants must have the ability to commit to a two-week stay. The OHC is accepting applications from February 1 through March 1, 2026.
Applications are open to professors, curators, post-doctoral researchers and fellows, museum professionals, and artists at any stage of their career. Applicants must not be currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program. They must work in art history or a related field and have an interest in integrating oral history into their work, whether it be conducting interviews, incorporating archival interviews into an exhibition, or teaching students how to design and implement oral history projects.
The goal of the program is to provide scholars with current best practices in oral history methodology and theory; practical skills to conduct their own oral history projects; opportunities to practice interviewing; insights from art historians and visual arts professionals who use oral history in multiple capacities; and dedicated time and space to reflect on the role of oral history in their work.
The Summer Institute in Art History features a mix of instruction from seasoned OHC staff, professors and curators who specialize in art history and visual culture, and guest speakers, including Bridget Cooks, Elaine Yau, Shannon Jackson, Anneka Lenssen, and more. Instruction will be blended with small workshop groups, one-on-one advising, individual work time, and field visits around the San Francisco Bay Area.
The program will be at no cost to selected fellows, as this Summer Institute was made possible with support from Getty. There is a $5 application fee. We will accept up to 20 fellows currently residing in the United States at the time of the Summer Institute.
Getty
The OHC was founded in 1953 and one of the oldest oral history programs in the United States. Over the decades, we have conducted several thousands of interviews on myriad topics, including on the lived experiences and history of artists, art institutions, and philanthropy. Today, the OHC produces carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed oral histories and interpretive materials for the widest possible use, resulting in an archive of over 25,000 hours of interview recordings and transcripts. The vast majority of these interview transcripts have been digitized and made available online for public access via the UC Berkeley Library Digital Collections. The OHC has undertaken numerous projects on art museums, foundations, and visual artists, including with the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Getty Research Institute, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Asian Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, and the San Francisco Opera.
Oral History Summer Institute in Art History Application Timeline
By no means was Malcolm finished. He still had work to do, come the hell of Parkinson’s and the high water threatening to stifle his voice, his mobility, his agility. Yet he forged ahead. Malcolm Margolin, the founder of Heyday Books, writer extraordinaire, and supporter of innumerable Indigenous, environmental, literary, historical, and arts projects for fifty years, passed away on August 20, 2025. Several obituaries have already extolled Malcolm’s wonderful contributions in the Bay Area and across California. Caretaking nature inspired his early works, leading to his creation of Heyday Books in 1974. That press and his lively personality attracted an array of writers, craftspeople, Indigenous culture bearers, environmentalists, and more.
In 2017, The Bancroft Library became a recipient of Malcolm’s archives. He highly respected this temple of literary riches. The respect was mutual: In 2008 Malcolm received the Hubert Howe Bancroft Award for his contributions to California literature and history. Marking those contributions are 75 cartons of Heyday archives, one box and two cartons of Malcolm’s personal archives, and the interviews I did with him for over two years about his life and work.
My friendship with Malcolm was initiated thanks to his daughter Sadie, who attended my English class at Merritt College. Based on my responses to her essays, Malcolm invited me to edit a couple of memoirs that came his way. Eventually I asked when he would write about his own storied life.
“Oh, I don’t have time for that!”
Unacceptable! So I offered to record his tales. I’d long been fascinated by capturing oral histories because of my great-great-grandparents, H.H. and Matilda Bancroft who, in the late 19th century, had eagerly copied down reminiscences of pioneers of the West. In October, 2011, Malcolm began recounting with me his life trajectory, from growing up in Boston where he was born on October 27, 1940, to what it meant to face the end of his time at Heyday in 2014, with many adventures and illustrious people encountered in between. I’ve never claimed to be an oral historian, given the formal training one can undergo to don that title. But Malcolm and I had developed a shared sense of humor and depth that made rambling through a variety of topics easy and intriguing. Those interviews are now available online and lodged at the renowned Oral History Center collection at The Bancroft, titled: ‘Such a goddamn beautiful life,’ Conversations about Heyday Books and Everything Else.
Malcolm Margolin and author and interviewer Kim Bancroft at Heyday Books book talk. Photo courtesy of Kim Bancroft.
From those interviews came his biography, including passages from forty more interviews with staff, authors, family, and friends. The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher came out in 2014 (a Commonwealth Club California Book Award winner that year), in time for Malcolm to celebrate his forty years with Heyday. Meanwhile, Heyday found a perfect new director in Steve Wasserman, a Berkeley native with writing acumen and editorial connections developed at Yale University Press, among others. With Steve’s leadership and ever dedicated staff, Heyday continues to have a remarkable impact on California publishing and support of California Indian culture.
Still driven, Malcolm initiated the California Institute of Culture, Arts, and Nature (Calif I CAN). Malcolm’s old friend and lifelong environmental, peace, and arts activist Claire Greensfelder helped in that effort and then became Calif I CAN’s hardworking executive director. By 2022, with Malcolm’s avid input, even from a bed when he could no longer walk on his own, Calif I CAN had developed multiple and significant ventures, including the annual California Native Ways and Berkeley Bird Festivals in Berkeley, a project to “remap California” in an atlas of original Indigenous names, and a book about West Berkeley’s historic Shellmound and the effort to save it from being built over with an apartment complex.
Despite all that activity, Malcolm still had plenty of time to muse while at his nursing facility, dependent on others for mobility. His ever-present and self-described “dreaminess” now led him to envision unearthing gems from his archives and those of Heyday to find more material for publishing, especially in order to highlight the many captivating people he had come to know through Heyday. Ironically, in 2008 when the Heyday staff was preparing to move from the Koerber Building on University Avenue to its next location, the fate of the Heyday archives was in question. Patricia Wakida, then on the staff, recounted arriving on a Monday morning to learn of Malcolm’s “purge” of their file cabinets. Patricia asked, “How was your weekend?” Malcolm replied, “Oh, I just threw out all my s—.” Meaning he had thrown boxes of Heyday papers into the dumpster out back. “What?!” she cried, in shock. “Shouldn’t you be putting it in The Bancroft Library or somewhere?” Apparently, Malcolm just laughed and said, “Yeah, I think Kevin Starr is going to be really mad at me.” Historian Kevin Starr, Malcolm’s friend, was also the California State Librarian.
Fortunately, Malcolm hadn’t thrown out all the files that documented Heyday’s history of its collaborations with writers and their manuscripts, letters, and more. In 2017, The Bancroft Library received that treasure trove of creativity in many remaining archives. Ever creative, curious and ambitious, Malcolm sought in the last two years of his life to make something from that cache of papers. Because he depended on others for mobility in those last years, “Malcolm had more time to think about his legacy,” Claire noted. He engaged Pam Michael to help sort his papers into meaningful files, and Claire Greensfelder worked assiduously with him at the Library itself as Malcolm sifted through boxes and cartons in search of the next book project, and the next.
I accompanied Malcolm on an early trip to The Bancroft to create an inventory of his papers, which included items from his early writing forays in the 1960s on: college papers, notebooks, manuscript drafts, poetry, random essays. I’d extract a file, type a description of its contents, and sometimes read aloud an amusing title and a few sentences. Malcolm would laugh, then share a tidbit of the memory just pulled from his past. Some examples: “A Hundred Thousand Orgasms 1968-1969 (more innocent than it sounded),” “The Education of a Seattle Cabbie 1969” (as harrowing as could be anticipated), and “The Wilderness Beneath the Slash Pile 1970” (showing his ever-environmentalist connections to the earth).
Malcolm was able to continue his explorations at The Bancroft, along with other projects around Berkeley and beyond, because of the superior support he received from family and friends, especially from his caregiver David Scortino and writing assistant Pam Michael. David gently maneuvered Malcolm in and out of his wheelchair and navigated him everywhere, including into The Bancroft Library’s small conference room where he, Claire, and Malcolm worked twice a month for two years. After their two hours of research, they’d have lunch on campus, either at the Free Speech Movement Café or the Faculty Club, often arranging to meet someone with whom Malcolm wanted to exchange news and ideas. David made movement and meals “seamless,” according to Claire. Of his time with Malcolm at the library, David wrote, “The Bancroft wasn’t just a building or connection that made Malcolm’s work more enjoyable. It was a village that made it possible.” Claire also sang the praises of The Bancroft Library staff who welcomed these archival archaeologists with great warmth. One book has already come from the archives, an anthology of Malcolm’s writing about his encounters with Native peoples: Deep Hanging Out: Wanderings and Wonderment in Native California (Heyday, 2021).
More scintillating writing shall be revealed. Said Claire, “Malcolm knew a gold mine lay in all those letters with authors who had become part of Heyday, along with their writing, photos, and other intriguing ephemera, like event posters. It made Malcolm incredibly happy to revisit those forty years with Heyday. “Also, going there allowed him to get out of his bed and room at Piedmont Gardens, where he was treated well but felt so limited compared to what his life had been.” Now he could see himself again in the role of a professional culture bearer. “He was so grateful for that opportunity, and for the support of the staff at the Library.”
The work remains of digitizing all of Malcolm’s archives and those of Heyday, not to mention additional records compiled by Calif I CAN, requiring the raising of funds. Over the summer, an intern named Robert West helped scan some of the multitudinous communications in the archives, with Malcolm’s ultimate hope of publishing a book of key correspondence. Said Claire, “Looking at the letters exchanged between Heyday staff, Malcolm, and writers, you get a sense of their breadth of knowledge and networking, their delight in their work. What a phenomenal influence Heyday has had across the state and beyond!”
I like to think of Malcolm Margolin’s laughter still ringing out from the small conference room and pouring into the Reading Room at The Bancroft Library where his words and deeds will live on, as we cherish all kinds of archives preserved there.
For over 150 years, residents and visitors alike have not run short of reasons to support the claim, “There’s no place like California.” And since the 1960s, that claim has been echoed—albeit in whispers—among cannabis circles around the globe. This summer, Oral History Center historian Todd Holmes has been traveling up and down the state to document the overlooked history of California cannabis communities as part of the multidisciplinary project, Legacy Cannabis Genetics: People and their Plants, A Community-Driven Study. Funded in 2023 by a $2.7 million grant from the California Department of Cannabis Control, the project is now in its final year charting the history and genetic heritage of the state’s famed cannabis communities.
LCG Research Team at community engagement meeting in Mendocino County. (Left to Right): Hannah Nelson (Origins Council); Genine Coleman (Origin Council); Todd Holmes (UC Berkeley Oral History Center); Dominic Corva (Cal Poly Humboldt); Kerin Law (LeafWorks and Canndor Herbarium); Caleb Chen (Research Assistant, Cal Poly Humboldt); Yaw Reinier (Research Assistant, Cal Poly Humboldt)
In many respects, the study can be seen as one of the first of its kind. The research team is composed of academic and community researchers from across the state: sociologist Dominic Corva from Cal Poly Humboldt; historian Todd Holmes from UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center; Genine Coleman from Origins Council, a nonprofit public policy and research institute serving the state’s historic rural cannabis farming regions; Khalil Ferguson of United CORE, a statewide equity advocacy organization representing the interests of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in urban communities; and Eleanor Kuntz, co-founder of Canndor the world’s first cannabis herbarium, and co-founder and CEO of LeafWorks, a genomics and plant science company. Moreover, the project operates through Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), a methodology premised on a partnership approach to research that equitably involves community members, organizational representatives, and academic researchers in all aspects of the research process. “CBPR is an approach that not only affords community members an equal seat at the table,” Holmes explained, “but more importantly recognizes them as the real experts in this field.” Typically used in public health research, the CBPR approach of the project represents the first time the methodology has been used in cannabis research.
Cannabis Farm in Nevada County, California, getting ready for harvest.
For the oral history component of the project, Holmes is conducting around 100 hours of oral history interviews with cannabis farmers and breeders throughout the state. When complete, the oral histories will comprise the California Cannabis Oral History Collection at the Bancroft Library, another first-of-its-kind component of the project. “For most of the communities in this project, this is the first time they have told their stories,” Holmes explained. “It’s a powerful reminder of the importance of oral history and a real honor to help place California cannabis within the historical record.”
Be on the lookout for the release of the California Cannabis Oral History Collection in the fall of 2026. For more on the project, visit the Legacy Cannabis Genetics website.
Dr. Harold Palmer Smith, Jr., was a scientist, consultant, and defense policy expert who earned tenure at UC Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering in 1966, chaired the UC Davis Department of Applied Science at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the early 1970s at the request of Edward Teller, and served the United States government and military in various roles throughout his life, including in the 1990s as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs. In that role for the US Department of Defense, Dr. Smith oversaw the security, safety, reliability, and treaty adherence of weapons of mass destruction for the United States and NATO arsenals. And, at the end of the Cold War, Dr. Smith implemented the historic Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program to dismantle the nuclear, chemical, and biological arsenals of the former Soviet Union in accordance with the strategic arms limitation treaties then in effect.
From left to right: Vladimir Putin, then mayor of St. Petersburg; Mikhail Kasyanov, then deputy Minister of Finance; Harold Palmer Smith, Jr.; and Russian-English interpreter Irene Nehonov in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1994.
From June to August of 2023, Dr. Smith and I recorded fourteen-hours of his full-life oral history over seven interview sessions at The Bancroft Library, which resulted in his 304-page transcript, including a small appendix of photographs from his life and career.
I’m sad to report that Dr. Smith passed away in early August 2025, a few months shy of his ninetieth birthday. You can read Dr. Smith’s obituary, as shared by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies. Upon Dr. Smith’s retirement from his remarkable career of teaching, research, public service, and private consulting, he became a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, where he created the Harold Smith Seminar Series on Defense Policy for public lectures on subjects related to national security.
Below is a brief summary of what Dr. Smith and I explored in his oral history, followed by several video clips from his recorded interview sessions. For greater detail on the diversity of topics discussed during each hour of Dr. Smith’s 14-hour-long oral history, please consult the discursive Table of Contents in the frontmatter to his published transcript.
Left to right: Russian General Evgenii Petrovich Maslin, Russian-English interpreter Irene Nehonov, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Harold Palmer Smith, Jr., in the US Supreme Court chambers in 1996. Dr. Smith discusses this meeting the video below.
Harold Palmer Smith, Jr., was born in November 1935 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. He earned a B.S. degree in 1957 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he met his wife, Marian Bamford. They married in 1958 and have three children born between 1959 and 1963. Smith completed his Ph.D. thesis on nuclear powered rocketry at MIT in 1960, the same year he joined the faculty in Nuclear Engineering at UC Berkeley. After service in 1961 as an active-duty ROTC officer in the Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Smith returned to UC Berkeley where he conducted research on fissioning gas, Xenon poisoning, and nuclear sputtering to earn tenure in 1966. After a White House Fellowship under the direction of the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara from 1966 to 1967, Smith regularly advised the US government on defense-related science and policy. From 1969 to 1975, Smith served as Chairman of UC Davis’s Department of Applied Science located adjacent to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Harold Palmer Smith, Jr., with his longtime friend, hiking buddy, and former US Secretary of Defense William Perry in the Great Hall of the Ahwahnee Hotel at Yosemite National Park in 2007.
Upon retiring from the University of California in 1976, Smith worked through his Palmer Smith Corporation as a private defense industry consultant and government advisor. From 1993 to 1998, Smith accepted an appointment with the Clinton administration as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs with responsibilities for the reliability, security, safety, and treaty adherence of weapons of mass destruction for the United States and NATO arsenals. He was responsible for implementation of the Cooperative Threat Reduction (Nunn Lugar) program and worked with former-Soviet officials to dismantle their weapons of mass destruction and convert related industries to commercial production. Smith then returned to UC Berkeley as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence with the Institute for Governmental Studies and organized the Harold Smith Seminar Series on Defense and National Security. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Commander in the Legion of Honor of France, and thrice received the Distinguished Public Service Award, the highest honor granted by the Department of Defense for civilian service. In this oral history, Smith discusses all of the above with details on his careers in academia, private consulting, and especially his government service in the Department of Defense.
Harold Palmer Smith, Jr. on teaching nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, early 1960s
Harold Palmer Smith, Jr. shares his Edward Teller memories, 1970s
Harold Palmer Smith, Jr. on reducing weapons of mass destruction in the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Program, 1990s
Harold Palmer Smith, Jr. on NATO’s “slow pig” or Senior-Level Weapon Protection Group (SLWPG), 1990s
Harold Palmer Smith, Jr. on Russian General Evgeny Petrovich Maslin and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Program, 1990s
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Sign up for our newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you’d like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. As a soft-money research unit of The Bancroft Library, the Oral History Center must raise outside funding to cover its operational costs for conducting, processing, and preserving its oral history work, including the salaries of its interviewers and staff, which are not covered by the university. You can give online, or contact us at ohc@berkeley.edu for more information about our funding needs for present and future projects.
Left to right: Malcolm, Wilbert. Photograph by Paul Burnett
I have two snow-white rabbits.
One night, recently, they both started thumping. Rabbits thump for any number of reasons, including their disapproval and pleas for attention. But the main reason rabbits raise up their enormous hind legs to shake the ground is because they sense danger. They are trying to warn the warren that something very bad is about to happen. I ignored them at first, then tried to calm them. Sometimes they just want food, so I fed them. Sometimes they just freak each other out. Thump. Thump!
I was tired of their noise, and tired, so I indulged them by looking outside. Peering back at me on their hind legs were two enormous raccoons who seemed very interested in the rabbits and completely unafraid of me.
In my job as an interviewer, and in my life, I think a lot about listening, what it is, and what it is not. There is probably no clearer signal than an animal making a noise to alert their group. Humans, by contrast, have evolved elaborate languages for expressing themselves. Language should give us greater powers of precise, lightning-clear communication. But language often fails us. Words so often conceal, deflect, or deceive. Social media platforms promise instant, global, direct connection to others, but we know by their design that they privilege extreme and polarizing speech. How are we doing with all of that?
Part of the problem is just the medium of text, which is so often shorn of other signals: the tone, the pauses, the momentary facial expressions, the emotions, the signs.
Maybe, in our most urgent situations, with our alligator brains activated, language serves us just fine. Danger we know, right? We know how to thump, right?
Regardless of the medium – through video, audio, or text-based conversations – it might be our receivers that are jammed, defective, and underpowered. I think of all the filters I had that prevented me from hearing rabbit danger. I had an idea that our home was safe, from anything that would threaten a rabbit, anyway. I had a story in my head that was blocking me from hearing, a story about my rabbits as needy, hungry, spoiled, and mischievous, in part because, let’s face it, they are. They were thumping just to mess with us. They were thumping because of something in them, the default fear of a prey animal. Their thumping didn’t really mean danger because I had read about rabbit motives in a book.
But sometimes it’s just raccoons.
Here, at UC Berkeley, and at any school, students will be asked to speak, to develop their knowledge and skills, to contribute to innovation in the communications technologies we will all be using in the near future, to engage with others, to deploy their speech-and-debate championship rhetoric when they are out in the world. They will be asked to speak, and hopefully to speak freely.
But speech is only one small part of communication. Some of our popular public figures are really good with a simple story, with a rhetorical trick, to make us feel good, or aggrieved, or righteous, or inspired. But so often they are just tapping into our filters, our ideas of who we already think we are. The Pied Piper is not such a hot musician; it’s just that our ears resonate at that frequency. If I’m going to really hear someone else, some fellow rabbit, I need to check all the reasons I have developed not to listen.
What oral historians have to do in interviews is think really critically about our own backgrounds, assumptions, preferences, and frameworks for understanding the topic at hand and the person with whom we are creating a life history. Only by grappling with our subjectivity can we hope to understand that of another. Empathy is not putting ourselves in the shoes of someone else; it’s gazing deeply at our own shoes, trying to walk without them, feeling how they shape our feet, and understanding that we can’t walk in someone else’s shoes. But we can ask other people about their shoes, and what it’s like to walk in them. That’s where empathy begins. Empathy is not a capacity; it’s a space you have to choose to step into.
To the incoming students of UC Berkeley, I don’t know how to navigate this world. All I can offer is what seems to work for oral historians who work with others to tell their stories.
You may need to burn through a bit of who you think you are to really hear someone, and you may find that the you who comes out the other side is not tricked, indoctrinated, or weakened. You may find yourself bigger, stronger, more capable, more resilient, more useful, and more of what we all need right now and from now on. That’s what everyone here is betting on.
So listen, okay?
Sometimes it’s raccoons.
Thump!
Welcome to the bigger, stronger, more capable you, class of 2029.
Three new and substantial Sierra Club Oral History Project interviews became available to the public earlier this year: Lawrence D. Downing (recorded in 2019), Debbie Sease (recorded in 2020), and Vivien Li (recorded in 2021). See further below for details about their unique oral history interviews.
Now over fifty-years old, the Sierra Club Oral History Project is a partnership between the Sierra Club—one of the oldest and most influential environmental organizations in the United States—and the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley—one of the nation’s oldest organizations professionally recording and preserving oral history interviews. The Sierra Club Oral History Project documents the leadership, programs, strategies, and ideals of the national Sierra Club as well as the Club’s grassroots at regional and chapter levels from the early twentieth century through the present. These oral history interviews highlight the breadth, depth, and significance of the Sierra Club’s eclectic environmental efforts—from wilderness preservation to promoting environmental justice; from outdoor adventures to climate change activism; from environmental education to chemical regulation; from litigation to lobbying; from California to the Carolinas, and from Alaska to international realms. The Sierra Club Oral History Project arose around 1970 and has moved through cycles of intensity and lull due to the availability of funding for recording and publishing new interviews. Throughout, the Sierra Club Oral History Project has produced an unprecedented testimony of engagement in and on behalf of the environment as experienced by individual members and leaders of the Sierra Club. Together with the sizable archive of Sierra Club papers and photographs in The Bancroft Library, the Sierra Club Oral History Project offers an extraordinary lens on the evolution of environmental issues and activism over the past century, as well as the motivations, conflicts, and triumphs of individuals who helped direct that evolution—as told in their own words.
Lawrence D. Downing, Sierra Club President, 1986 to 1988.
Lawrence D. Downing is a Minnesota lawyer who, from 1983 to 1996, served nine years on the Sierra Club board of directors, including as Club president from 1986 to 1988. From 1986 to 1995, he was a Sierra Club Foundation Trustee, including as president from 1990 to 1992. Downing was born in August 1936, in McPherson, Kansas. In 1958, he earned his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Iowa State University, and then worked for the Proctor & Gamble Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he helped invent the liquid cleaner “Mr. Clean.” He earned his Juris Doctor in 1962 from the University of Minnesota Law School, where he edited the Minnesota Law Review. From 1962 until his retirement in 2010, Downing practiced matrimonial law in Rochester, Minnesota. After joining the Sierra Club by mail in 1969, Downing held leadership positions at every level: as founder and chair of his local Wasioja Group in the North Star Chapter; as chair of the North Star Chapter; as an executive in the National Sierra Club Council; as chair of numerous national committees; as a Sierra Club Foundation Trustee, including a term as president; and as an elected member to the national Sierra Club board of directors for nine years between 1983 and 1996, including his terms as Club president from 1986 to 1988. As a national leader, Downing earned the nickname “Mr. Grassroots” for advocating training and support for Sierra Club volunteers. Downing also forged international connections with the John Muir Trust and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society to help return to Scotland the preservationist legacy of Sierra Club founder John Muir, who was born in Scotland. Downing received the Centennial Campaign Award for his work in the late 1980s and early 1990s as Chair of the Planning Committee for the Sierra Club’s $110 million Centennial Capital Campaign. He also received the Sierra Club’s award for continued service by a past director of the Club. In 2003 and 2004, Downing played a fundamental role in the “Groundswell Sierrans” movement to prevent an elected take-over of the Sierra Club board of directors by a coalition of immigration opponents, white supremacists, and animal rights organizations who disguised their campaign in rhetoric against overpopulation. Downing also served on the board of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, the largest non-profit environmental law firm in Minnesota. In this interview, Downing details all of the above and comments on the evolution of both volunteer and staff leadership of the Sierra Club, including several conflicts within and between volunteer and staff leadership.
Debbie Sease at the Sierra Club’s office in Washington, DC, early 1980s.
Debbie Sease worked from 1981 to 2020 as a Sierra Club lobbyist in its Washington, DC, office, where she became Legislative Director as well as National Campaign Director. Sease was born in November 1948 in Oklahoma, where she contracted polio at age three. Each year throughout her childhood, Sease spent several months in a Texas hospital receiving surgeries to repair damaged leg tissue. At age 10, Sease’s family moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where her mother died six years later from cancer. Upon graduating high school in 1967, Sease took architecture and photography courses at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Sease soon became active in the New Mexico Wilderness Committee, where she met her first husband Dave Foreman. Conservationist Celia Hunter offered Sease and Foreman jobs as lobbyists for the Wilderness Society in Washington, DC, where they moved in 1978. Upon arriving, Sease dedicated her career to preserving public lands, initially on Bureau of Land Management wilderness reviews, and to advocating for environmental policies. In 1981, Sease began working for the Sierra Club, from which she retired in 2020. Her career in Washington, DC, spanned from the end of the environmental decade in the 1970s, through seven US Presidential administrations and numerous shifts in Congress, up through the end of the Trump administration in 2020. Upon her retirement, Sease and her husband Russ Shay split their time between their home on Capitol Hill and their cabin on twelve acres in the Shenandoah Valley. In this oral history, Sease recounts all the above with a focus on her nearly four decades as a Sierra Club lobbyist in Washington, DC, including details on particular campaigns and specific wilderness lands she helped protect, as well as her reflections and hard-earned wisdom on successful legislative campaigning. Throughout, Sease discusses ways the Sierra Club has evolved throughout her career, as well as the ways environmental politics have changed over time, especially in the nation’s capital.
Vivien Li became the first person of color elected to the Sierra Club Board of Directors from 1986 to 1992, chaired the Club’s newly established Ethnic and Cultural Diversity Task Force from 1990 to 1994, and lead The Boston Harbor Association from 1991 to 2015 as an advocate for a clean, alive, accessible, and climate resilient waterfront. Li was born in New York City in February 1954 as the first of five children to parents who emigrated from China. Li’s family moved to suburbs near Ridgewood, New Jersey, where, as a rising high school senior, she began her environmental activism shortly after the first Earth Day in 1970. While attending college from 1971 to 1975, Li worked part time as an environmental planner in the administration of Newark Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in environmental management from Barnard College at Columbia University and working for the City of Newark, New Jersey, Li became a community fellow in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning from 1976 to 1977. Li was conference coordinator for City Care, a national conference on the urban environment held in 1979 in Detroit, Michigan, which brought together 700 environmental and civil rights activists associated with conference sponsors the Sierra Club, National Urban League, and the Urban Environmental Conference and Foundation. Li served as the Sierra Club’s New Jersey Chapter Chair and Regional Conservation Committee Chair prior to her election to the Club’s Board of Directors. In 1983, she earned a Master’s of Public Administration and Urban and Regional Planning from Princeton University, a year before marrying Bob Holland, with whom she has two children. In the 1980s, Li worked for the Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner and as senior staff to Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Li received the Sierra Club’s Walter Starr Award in 2015 and has continued her Sierra Club involvement on the Club’s Finance and Risk Management Committee and its Investment Advisory Committee. Li’s oral history discusses all the above, with emphasis on her environmental and Sierra Club activism from the early 1970s through the early twenty-first century, particularly on issues of environmental justice and on renewal of urban waterfronts, including in Boston, Massachusetts, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
ABOUT THE ORAL HISTORY CENTER
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you’d like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. As a soft-money research unit of The Bancroft Library, the Oral History Center must raise outside funding to cover its operational costs for conducting, processing, and preserving its oral history work, including the salaries of its interviewers and staff, which are not covered by the university. You can give online, or contact us at ohc@berkeley.edu for more information about our funding needs for present and future projects.
In 1870, the Regents of the University of California system voted to admit women on the same basis as men. Since then, female members of the faculty, staff, and student body have been inextricable from the University of California’s achievements and legacy. This Women’s History Month, the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library would like to highlight interviews from female faculty members who achieved historic “firsts” at the University of California, Berkeley. The four Professors featured in this blog post were interviewed as a part of the Oral History Center’s Education and University of California, African American Faculty and Senior Administrators at Berkeley, and Women Political Leaders projects.
Herma Hill Kay teaching at Berkeley Law, c. 1970s. Image courtesy of Berkeley Law.
Herma Hill Kay was the second woman ever hired to UC Berkeley’s Law faculty in 1960, following the impending retirement of their first female professor, Barbara Armstrong. Kay taught at Berkeley Law for an astonishing fifty-seven years, during which the number of female faculty and students greatly increased as a direct result of her efforts. Germaine LaBerge, the interviewer for Kay’s oral history, recalls “Only fourteen women anywhere in the United States had become law professors before Professor Kay joined the faculty at Boalt Hall [now Berkeley Law].” In addition to her historic tenure, when Kay was “selected as Boalt’s first woman dean in 1992, she was adding to a long list of ‘firsts’ that, taken together, make an exceptional story” (pg. i).
Herma Hill Kay, image date not provided..
Kay devoted her career to furthering the rights of women, specifically pursuing cases concerning sex-based discrimination and California marital property laws. As a result, Kay contributed to the conception of the first no-fault divorce law in the United States. In her oral history, she attributed her passion for women’s rights to a firm belief in legal equality for all: “I’ve always felt very strongly—and this came from my father—that women ought to be free and conscious actors. They ought to determine their own role in this world. So I was very opposed to anything that would stand in the way of their self-realization. I feel the same way about racial equality. There shouldn’t be any barriers placed in front of anybody to do what that person wants to do and is able to do.” (Kay 2005, pg. 76) In addition to her academic achievements, Kay played a pivotal role in forming both the Berkeley Faculty Women’s Club in 1969 and the Boalt Hall’s Women’s Association. She passed away at the age of eighty-two in 2017, but her legacy and impact on the law community at UC Berkeley remains evident to this day.
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, c. 1996. Photograph by Julian C.R. Okwu.
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs began teaching at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare in 1979 and earned tenure as a full professor in 1986. Shortly after, in 1993, Gibbs earned an endowed appointment as the Zellerbach Family Fund Professor of Social Policy, Community Change and Practice—a position she held until her retirement in 2000. She became the first African American professor appointed to the position of endowed chair across the UC system. The Oral History Center interviewed Gibbs in 2003 and 2004 as a part of their African American Faculty and Senior Staff Oral History Project. Over the course of her career at the University, she contributed to several key dialogues in African American Studies. These included articles and books she wrote on “minority mental health, young Black men in America, and the O.J. Simpson and Rodney King cases” (pg. v). Gibbs also testified before the U.S. Congress concerning her research on young Black males.
Gibbs devoted her scholarly and personal pursuits to furthering justice and equality for several minority groups, which she detailed during her oral history: “So, this whole idea of all of the early influences which were around social justice from my family, my father and growing up in the church, have kind of really been a very, very deep influence on me in my work, coming back to that and looking at it in the last book that I did and even now things that I’m doing, the kinds of things I’m going to volunteer doing, it’s really coming back to civil rights, human rights, and women’s rights and how we can make our communities work better for minorities, poor people, the disadvantaged people and women. And that’s what I have done” (Gibbs 2010, pg. 424). Upon her retirement in late 2000, Gibbs earned the Berkeley Citation, the University’s highest honor awarded to individuals “whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields.”
As the first woman tenured by the UC Berkeley Anthropology department, Laura Nader had an extensive impact on the University’s history and culture. She joined the faculty in 1960, the same year Herma Hill Kay started at Berkeley Law. Nader published ten books and around 290 other publications over the course of her career. As an influential and popular professor at UC Berkeley, she taught thousands of undergraduate students and supervised more than one-hundred PhD students. She recounted one of these popular classes in her oral history interview: “I puzzled because I never really understood why do students love the course Controlling Processes so much? Why do they remember it? Like the woman who said, ‘I took a course from you ten years ago.’ And I said, ‘You remember it?’ And she said, ‘Yes, it was Controlling Processes.’ Why do they remember it? They don’t remember any courses from one semester to another; who taught it and whatever it is. Their memories are worse than seventy-five year olds. So it opens their eyes to something. But why are our eyes closed? We’re not looking at reality in this country and many people are saying this now.” (Nader 2014, pg. 88)
Nader also taught at several other prestigious universities across the country, such as Yale Law, Harvard Law, and Stanford. Her research explored the interactions of law, anthropology, and energy science, specifically in indigenous Mexican cultures and the Middle East. Nader served as an ambassador for both the UC Berkeley community and the field of anthropology more broadly. As a result of her contributions to law and anthropology, she received the Law and Society Association’s 1995 Kalven prize for distinguished research. Experts across disciplines have commended her theoretical and ethical approaches to her research questions.
Gloria Bowles (bottom left) at the first UC Berkeley Department of Women’s Studies graduation, 1980.
In the fall of 1976, Gloria Bowles taught the first cohort of students in the Women’s Studies department at UC Berkeley and served as its founding coordinator. She taught throughout the University of California system at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Davis for much of her career as a professor in Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies. She recalled, “In a sense, the women’s movement came to me through my students, because in one of those proposal meetings, they accepted my proposal for Comp Lit 40A, the undergraduate course. I had a wonderful group of women. Of course, these women were so excited to be reading women writers.” (Bowles 2021, page 16)
Gloria Bowles, c. 1987.
Bowles, like the other professors highlighted in this blog post, considered the Women’s Liberation Movement in conjunction with other Civil Rights movements taking place during the 20th century. “Feminist was not a word we used when we were undergraduates in Ann Arbor. I think we were more obsessed with civil rights. The women’s movement followed civil rights, and the Women’s Studies Program followed Ethnic Studies, and one movement came and another. I think probably thinking about civil rights causes you to think about your rights, or lack thereof—and of course, totally different, depending on your class and color. I think that I always thought about things like that, although I didn’t give them labels.” (Bowles 2021, page 17)
After her retirement from academia. Bowles established the Berkeley Women’s Studies Movement Archive at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Bowles influenced the Bay Area’s feminist culture and paved the way for generations of female scholars to come.
Conclusion
Herma Hill Kay, Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, Laura Nader, and Gloria Bowles all achieved historic milestones and paved the way for future generations of female students and faculty at UC Berkeley. Without their contributions, UC Berkeley would be drastically different from the community we know today. They are just four of the dozens of influential women faculty members that the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviewed. To find more fascinating oral histories like these, explore the Education and University of California and African American Faculty and Senior Administrators at Berkeley oral history projects. For additional information, explore the 150 Years of Women at Berkeley history project, which includes Oral Histories of Berkeley Women.
Read the full oral histories of these women:
Herma Hill Kay, “Herma Hill Kay: Professor, 1960-Present, and Dean, 1992-2000, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley,” interview by Germaine LaBerge in 2003, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2005.
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, “Jewelle Taylor Gibbs,” interview by Leah McGarrigle in 2002, 2003 and 2004, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2010.
Laura Nader, “Laura Nader: A Life of Teaching, Investigation, Scholarship and Scope,” interview by Samuel Redman and Lisa Rubens in 2013, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2014.
Gloria Bowles, “Gloria Bowles: The Founding of Women’s Studies,” conducted by Amanda Tewes in 2021, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2021.
“Iconic Professor and Former Berkeley Law Dean Herma Hill Kay Dies at 82.” 2022. UC Berkeley Law. March 24, 2022. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/article/iconic-professor-former-berkeley-law-dean-herma-hill-kay-dies-82/.
“‘Something Has to Change’: Collection Explores Movement behind UC Berkeley’s Women’s Studies Program.” 2021. UC Berkeley Library. 2021. https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/womens-studies.
ABOUT THE ORAL HISTORY CENTER
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you’d like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. As a soft-money research unit of The Bancroft Library, the Oral History Center must raise outside funding to cover its operational costs for conducting, processing, and preserving its oral history work, including the salaries of its interviewers and staff, which are not covered by the university. You can give online, or contact us at ohc@berkeley.edu for more information about our funding needs for present and future projects.
We are sad to announce the passing of george miller (his preference for lower-case spelling).
George entered the world of The Bancroft Library in 1997, shortly after his retirement and originally as a volunteer helping to process the records in the history of water rights and engineering in California. George had had a storied career in finance, bearing witness to and shaping some of the key developments in the US finance industry in the last half of the twentieth century. Most notable was his idea of passive investment in the form of an index fund, which would track a basket of top-performing stocks, premised on the notion that the growth of the market over time would beat active money managers. While at Bancroft, George also became captivated by the collection of oral histories produced by the Oral History Center. Over time, he began to make contributions to the archive by sponsoring oral histories with key figures in Bay Area politics, environmental activism, and journalism.
It was through this engagement with oral history that my predecessor Martin Meeker eventually persuaded George to do his own oral history. An important theme of George’s oral history is his philanthropic calling, which he described as “graduating from his day job … to more productive things.” A great feature of a life history is that one gets a sense of when values or passions took root. Early on, George developed a sense of duty, which led to a distinguished vocation as a philanthropist to institutions and causes dear to him, repaying the opportunities he was given, not just to his almae matres, UPenn and Cal, but to his community, to young students, to his city, his state, and to the world.
George was known for the pithy sayings that his friends and family called GAMOs – “george a. miller observations.” Underlying many of them was a pragmatic outlook on life, for example, “time is like money; you can only spend it once.” He took one of his father’s aphorisms to heart throughout his life as well, “There’s nothing sadder than something done well that shouldn’t be done at all.” Taking great care to identify what was worth fighting for, he was humble about his ability to bring about change. Musing on this, he proposed his own obituary: “He lived. He cared. He tried. Then he gave up.” But this is someone who spent thirty-five years finding a way to derive steady revenue from the chaos of the market. He invested where he thought he could have an impact. He cared and tried enough to build a credit union in Vietnam from the ground up to 160,000 members, fund the education of hundreds of students at UC Berkeley, make improvements to small-claims courts across the country, support environmental organizations, help revive the Market Street Railway, and secure the future of a beloved bar and grill in San Francisco, to name just a few of his accomplishments.
His friends called George “a piece of work.” He made a cheeky, no-nonsense difference in the world, a difference that we at The Bancroft Library and the Oral History Center have felt deeply and will miss.
Brianna Iswono is a third-year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley majoring in chemical engineering. Throughout the Fall 2024 semester, Brianna worked with Roger Eardley-Pryor of the Oral History Center to earn academic credits through Berkeley’s Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP). URAP provides opportunities for undergraduates to work closely with Berkeley scholars on cutting edge research projects for which Berkeley is world-renowned. In this post, Brianna reflects on her research about nuclear power as it appeared in the Oral History Center archives.
As a chemical engineering student at UC Berkeley, my coursework only briefly touches on topics of nuclear power and energy. I wanted to learn more and my curiosity deepened as I saw more and more headlines about nuclear energy in news articles and social media. To dive deeper, in the fall of 2024 I joined Berkeley’s URAP (Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program) under the mentorship of historian Roger Eardley-Pryor at the Oral History Center, where I analyzed various oral histories and technical reports about nuclear energy. Through this experience, what I discovered was not only a stronger interest in nuclear power, but a field marked by polarizing perspectives and profound complexity—one where simple answers do not exist.
William E. Siri, environmentalist and biophysicist, 1964
Nuclear power stands as one of the most reliable carbon-free energy sources available today. Unlike fossil fuels, it produces no carbon dioxide during electricity generation, which makes nuclear power a critical tool in the fight against climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Given the growing urgency for energy facilities to reduce their overall emissions, nuclear power offers a viable option for large-scale, reliable energy production. As former Sierra Club president, mountaineer, biophysicist, and Berkeley Lab energy analyst William E. Siri noted in his oral history in the late 1970s, “Coal is a very dirty fuel… That leaves nuclear as one clean energy source until solar and other energy sources are fully developed.” Today, solar and wind are more developed, but the energy they generate drops when the sun sets or when winds cease. By providing steady, continuous power, nuclear energy complements intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar, ensuring grid stability. This reliability reduces the need for fossil fuel-based backup systems and thus helps mitigate climate change.
David Brower, environmental activist and first executive director of the Sierra Club (undated).
However, nuclear power is not without its environmental challenges. The construction and operation of plants can disrupt local ecosystems, particularly since they are often built in rural areas rich in biodiversity and ecological value. Habitat disruption, deforestation, and the high demand for water used in reactor cooling all remain significant concerns. The presence of nuclear plants places an increased strain on local water resources, particularly in underserved regions already facing water scarcity. In the first of his two archived oral history interviews, David Brower, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest environmental organization, explained about the Club’s consideration of nuclear power, “You certainly haven’t helped the poor by degrading the environment, the working place, by not getting into the battles to protect them from the chemicals that they’re exposed to.”
Laurence I. Moss, nuclear engineer and former Sierra Club president, 1973.
Also, the visual impact of large nuclear facilities can dramatically alter the character of scenic areas. At least in California, public opposition was fueled historically by concern that industrial structures for nuclear power detracts from the natural beauty and environment of rural areas, making them appear stark and out of place. Laurence I. Moss, former Sierra Club president and nuclear engineer, worked directly on construction of nuclear reactors. Moss shared in his oral history, “In my mind it was always a location issue. That was not the right place to put a nuclear power plant, or any industrial facility. I would not want to put a residential development there, anything that would alter the natural environment for the worse.” Moss’s perspective highlights the tension between technological advancement and environmental preservation, underscoring the importance of careful site selection to balance progress with respect for natural landscapes.
Professor Thomas H. Pigford, founding chair of UC Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, 2001.
Another major challenge, and perhaps the most pressing, is the management of nuclear waste. Nuclear reactors generate long-lived radioactive waste that requires secure, long-term storage, and even the most advanced waste repositories carry the risk of leakage or contamination over the thousands of years that spent nuclear fuel remains toxic. Efforts to manage nuclear waste have included ambitious ideas such as deep-sea disposal or even launching the waste into the sun. However, these approaches fail to fully eliminate the risk of leakage, especially given the exceptionally long timescales over which the waste must remain secure, and they often introduce additional challenges. As Thomas H. Pigford, the founding chair of UC Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, explained in his oral history from the late 1990s,“Another more attractive approach is to shoot the radioactive waste into the sun, which would require concentrating it to reduce the weight. And that’s where it belongs, because the sun is so radioactive. But there, the technical challenge or problem is the abort rate of missiles, of space vessels, and so when consulting the people in NASA, we concluded that that was just untenable.” Such unresolved issues remain a central concern for environmental advocates, highlighting the ongoing tension between the potential of nuclear power as a clean energy source and the ecological risks it poses.
Economically, nuclear power presents both opportunities and challenges. Once operational, nuclear reactors have relatively low fuel and operating costs compared to many other energy sources. Uranium, the main fuel used, is highly energy-dense, requiring only small amounts to generate large quantities of energy. This efficiency makes nuclear power a cost-effective solution to meet large-scale energy demands, providing a reliable supply of energy at a lower long-term cost while still delivering the high output needed to sustain industrial and societal needs. After working directly with the economic analysis of nuclear plant construction in the 1960s, Moss shared, “we were able to show that other alternatives, specifically a nuclear power alternative, built in those years could provide power at lower cost than the dams.” Nuclear power also has an extensive reach that goes far beyond reactors, influencing a wide range of industries and technologies. The advancements and expertise gained through working with radiation and the advanced technologies required for waste facilities have helped with the development of new medical technologies used to measure radiation. Professor Pigford was directly involved in establishing the nuclear engineering curriculum at Berkeley and saw its expansion into related medical technologies. In his oral history, Pigford shared “Yes, well, there are plenty of jobs in waste disposal. And they are emphasizing more and more the interaction with the bioengineering program, which, as you probably know, is a new push on the campus. There’s a new department, and they’ve even gone into the field of tomography, which is doing scans on the brain and on the rest of the body. These involve nuclear reactions and so the development of instrumentation for that, techniques of sensing the nuclear radiations and interpreting them, is occupying more and more time.” Pigford’s insight highlights how nuclear engineering graduates have the opportunity to apply their expertise to innovations in health-related technologies, such as medical imaging.
Environmental activist in Seoul, Korea, at a rally marking the 12th anniversary in 2023 of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster (photograph by Ahn Young-joon of Associated Press).
Yet, a major economic challenge of nuclear power is the huge initial investment needed to build a plant. Designing, constructing, and meeting regulatory standards for a single nuclear plant can cost billions of dollars. While the long-term operating costs are lower, the upfront costs to begin production are much higher than those of other energy sources.This creates a significant barrier, particularly for developing countries that may also lack the technical expertise or regulatory infrastructure needed to operate plants safely. In his oral history, Siri captured the economic trade-off and complexity of nuclear power. Siri noted, “The more countries that have nuclear power plants, particularly the less advanced countries, the more likelihood there will be of meltdowns, simply because many such countries don’t have the technical base on which to maintain such an industry.” For these countries, nuclear power offers a chance to advance economically, but it also comes with the greater risk of catastrophic failure.
Roy Woodall, Australian geologist (undated).
On the global stage, nuclear technology carries a sense of prestige. Non-nuclear nations often see other nations with advanced nuclear developments as leaders in innovation, which enhances their national pride and elevates their international status. The high demand for uranium to fuel nuclear reactors has led various countries to form alliances or joint ventures, employing any means necessary to secure a share of the advancements in nuclear technology. Roy Woodall, an Australian geologist known for his contributions to the mining and exploration industries, directly engaged with the mining sector to meet the growing global demand for uranium. In his oral history from the early 2000s, Woodall shared, “There was quite a lot of interest from other overseas companies in looking for uranium in Australia, so we formed a joint venture to look for conglomerate-type uranium deposits in Northern Western Australia.” His experience highlights the global scramble for uranium resources, reflecting how the race for nuclear technology has spurred both national and international collaboration.
Michael R. Peevey, an energy entrepreneur and regulator (undated).
However, the social risks associated with nuclear power are significant. Public fear of radiation exposure, which can lead to various health risks, has been intensified by past large-scale nuclear accidents like Fukushima and Three Mile Island, along with the media frenzy surrounding them. When reflecting on nuclear concerns during his oral history in 2019, Michael R. Peevey, a UC Berkeley alumnus, former electric utility executive, and previous president of the California Public Utilities Commission, recalled “But we had Chernobyl in Russia, which was a disaster; it’s a lingering disaster today.” Such concern has resulted in widespread resistance to the construction of new nuclear reactors and calls to shutdown existing ones. Grassroots movements and anti-nuclear campaigns have further fueled this opposition, creating a broad social aversion to nuclear power.
David Pesonen, attorney and environmentalist, 1963.
David E. Pesonen is a UC Berkeley alumnus, attorney, and environmental activist best known for his leadership role in the battle to defeat a PG&E nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay in the early 1960s. In his oral history recorded in the late 1990s, Pesonen explained his motivation for spreading the anti-nuclear power agenda. “Mainly because of the waste disposal problem. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know that anybody does. And also because I think the design of the generation of plants that we are involved with is inherently unsafe.” Despite the advanced safety features of modern plants, the widespread fear and skepticism continue to challenge the nuclear industry, highlighting the complex intersection of technological progress, environmental concerns, and public perception.
After conducting this oral history research and diving into the different aspects of nuclear power, I have come to realize that this field is inherently complex. I am still unsure where I stand in these debates, but one thing is clear: nuclear energy shouldn’t be dismissed outright. A recent LA Times article notes that, as energy-demanding technologies like AI continue developing rapidly, the demand for energy will only increase and all carbon-free options must be considered, especially in light of climate change. At the same time, we cannot ignore the risks that nuclear power poses. I think that the best approach is to carefully consider all non-fossil energy sources, such as nuclear or renewable, to make informed choices. Nuclear power is neither entirely good nor entirely bad; it is a complex and multifaceted technology with the potential for significant benefits and serious risks. Attitudes will likely continue to shift back and forth, but embracing the complexities of nuclear power is important to making wise decisions about its future role in meeting global energy needs. Reflecting on my semester of oral history research, I am grateful to have taken this URAP opportunity, as it gave me valuable insight and a new understanding of nuclear power that I always hoped to explore. Nuclear power is a complicated yet astonishing field, and I hope others can be informed on it to formulate their own stance on how to create a greener future.
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